Poorly lit work environments will always pose additional risks to any personnel operating hand tools. This problem is particularly troublesome for industrial application where equipment that is located next to other components that can easily be damaged or that present a hazard to the technician, such as exposed high-voltage sources or heavy equipment.
While external lighting is an obvious solution, it may not always be practical due to space and power source limitations where such tools are to be applied. For example, the external light may require it to be connected to an outlet by an extension cord and that the technician hangs in a position to illuminate the component. Such outlets, of course, are not always located near the equipment that is to be serviced. Furthermore, the light may relatively large so that technicians may not normally carry them when inspecting and adjusting equipment.
Several hand tools have been developed that contain their own light source, instead of depending upon the need for external lighting. The advantage of this approach is that the beam of light contained in the tool generally can be directed at the work area where the technician is performing the work without any additional manipulation and maneuvering of the light source.
One significant problem with most of these lighted hand tool approaches is that either the light generated by the tool is of lower intensity and insufficient, or the addition of the light impair the use of the tool. Generally, a lower intensity light results from the necessity of reducing the power consumption in an effort to reduce the size of the power source, and hence, reduce the tool bulkiness and footprint. In other designs, a lower light intensity is caused by the diffusion of the light when it is required to pass through obstructive structure of the tool itself. Accordingly, there is a need for improved lighted hand tool, such as a lighted plier hand tool, that has a high intensity light source with a low power consumption that will provide illumination directly to the desired work area or object to be grasped by the plier hand tool.